Booh booh here and bow wow there

Sinhala New Year arrives to us with a familiar sound of ‘koho koho’
of Cuckoo bird. Doggies bark ‘booh booh’ and cats, rather annoyingly
‘gnaaw gnaaw’ whenever they are hungry. Cockerels wake us up with their
‘kukku kook koo’ and cows ‘umbae’.

Onomatopoeia, the imitative making of words from natural sounds, is a
common phenomenon found in all languages of the world. In the realm of
linguistic study, it is commonly accepted that individual sounds do not
represent any particular meanings. It is, for instance, meaningless to
ask what [p] or [a] mean. The sound for the word of a particular meaning
is arbitrary; therefore there is generally no connection between sound
and meaning. This, however, is not absolutely correct, as we have
neglected the existence of a class of words, namely onomatopes, which do
appear in the everyday use of language quite often.

As its Greek root suggests, onomatopoeia is the making (poiein) of a
name or word (onoma) from natural sound. Onomatopes are thus imitative
words of these natural sounds.

Onomatopes are found in all languages of the world, and some
linguists in fact believe onomatopes were the first words human spoke
when language was developed.

Since direct imitation allows the hearer to understand the meaning
most easily, it is the most obvious way to describe actions (e.g. punch,
boom) and animals (e.g. cock, dodo), which constitute the most parts of
the conversation between primordial human. Therefore, the hypothesis is
indeed reasonable.

These primitive sounds have evolved over time, the remnants have
become today’s onomatopes, and even some words which we do not usually
regard as onomatopes.

Despite the importance of onomatopes in the world’s languages, the
linguistic study of them is pitifully inadequate. Many linguistics
regarded onomatopes as “second class citizens among words, since they
are often polysemous, while at the same time, paradoxically, applicable
to only a narrow semantic range”.

Generally, most onomatopoeic words around the world bear certain
similarities. For instance, the Latin word for the call of a cock is
cucurire, the word was either inherited or borrowed into many European
languages, giving birth to words like chichirichi in Italian, kikeriki
in German, kukeliku in Swedish and kukorekati in Russian. The velar
sound of ‘k’ is presented even in English and Sinhala versions of call
of cock.

Despite the above mentioned similarities, differences do exist
between languages.

The Cantonese call of a frog gwaagwaa, for instance, is quite
different from the English ribbit. The English boom for the sound of
explosion, is also quite unrecognizable to the Swahili twa. This raises
a difficult question to answer: Why do these onomatopes differ?

Supporters of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis propose that sounds
perceived by a hearer are in fact dependent upon the phonological system
of his language.

Sound effects are verbalized by means of the phonemes of a language
according to how the speakers hear the effects.

The hypothesis, however, has not met with adequate evidences.

Instead of accepting that the sounds we hear are altered by our
phonological system, it seems more reasonable to argue that the sounds
we speak are altered by the phonological system.

This is because even if we hear and perceive the same sounds, we
always imitate these sounds with a closest set of phonemes in our own
phonological system when we onomatopoeicize them.

Taking the buzzing of bees as an example, in most of the European
languages surveyed, the onomatopes involve a voiced fricative [z] to
represent the fricative sound made by the vibration of bees. But here in
Sinhalese, we call buzzing ‘gumu gumu’ with more familiar sounds for us.

It is interesting to observe that the whole world is separated by a
common language.